


spoonful of sugar

by hydrospanners



Series: renegade [16]
Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: Comedy, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Mid-Class Story, Pre-Expansions, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 15:56:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15844566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydrospanners/pseuds/hydrospanners
Summary: Everyone gets sick sometimes; even big damn heroes. These are vignettes about the Jedi Knight's crew getting sick, getting treated, and getting better.





	spoonful of sugar

“I am not sick,” Rhese insists, shivering despite the combined heat of Tatooine’s suns.

 

He’s been trembling like that for hours, obviously feverish beneath the heavy coat Kira suspects was intended for the ice plains of Hoth. His brown skin is washed out and pale and she knows it would be hot to the touch if he would let her near him, but he won’t. Stubborn ass refuses to admit there’s anything wrong.

 

“I am a Jedi,” he goes on, “and Jedi do not get sick.”

 

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Kira says, and wonders if she ought to call Rea. Teeseven at the least.

 

“I’ve been trained to flush over a hundred poisons from my system and resist the effects of exposure to vacuum. I assure you, _Padawan_ , that I am not compromised by something so simple as a virus.”

 

“Could be bacterial,” Kira suggests, earning herself a bleary-eyed, bloodshot glare. She has to resist the urge to laugh at him. He just looks so ridiculous, bundled up in his winter coat in the middle of a blisteringly hot desert, all red-eyed and red-nosed and pallid, his face scrunched up and angry. His hair’s probably a disaster under that hood and she hopes he passes out so she can get a good look. Maybe take a few holos for posterity. Rhese is never out of sorts like this; he’s got a stick shoved so far up his ass Kira wonders sometimes how he doesn’t choke on it.

 

“Hold the snark and focus on flying,” Rhese snaps, whipping his head around to face front again. He probably thinks he’s being sly, but Kira doesn’t miss his hands creeping toward the emergency grips (the ‘oh shit’ bars, as Rea would say) and she doesn’t miss how tightly he’s holding on, or how stiffly he’s holding himself.

 

Kira laughs at him. She can’t help it. It would be different if he’d just admit he’s sick, but he’s being so--so--So _Rhese_.

 

“I’m glad you find our imminent, fiery demise amusing,” he grumbles, knuckles growing whiter around the grips. “Maybe I should fly instead.”

 

“You thought that dewback we passed was three dewbacks.”

 

“There were three dewbacks. The other two just moved behind the--behind--” Rhese makes a noise that’s somewhere between a choke and a cough, his hands flying up to cover his mouth. His eyes are wide and panicked as they meet hers, as a long, horrible moment of knowing yawns between them.

 

Rhese tries to save her. He keeps his hands firmly over his mouth, even gets his head half-turned to the wind before it happens. Before he empties his stomach all over Kira’s brand new speeder. All over _Kira_.

 

#  # #

  
  
“Master Jedi.” Despite the cords and tubes trailing from his arms, Rusk climbs to his feet when Rea enters the room, snapping a salute sharp as any green private’s.

 

“At ease, Sergeant.” She returns a much sloppier salute before catching him by the arm, helping him back into his cot as his trembling knees threaten to give out. He looks like shit. Like wobbly, clammy, washed-out _shit_. The worst-she’s-ever-seen-him-looking kind of shit, and that’s counting the time with the rancor. “Where the hell is Doc?”

 

“Supply run, ma’am. Said if he wasn’t back by 0800 to send a search party.”

 

“Well,” Rea sighs. “That was three hours ago, so that’s great.”

 

Rusk frowns, eyes searching the room for a chrono that isn’t there. Doc chucked it his first day on board, said he’d dealt with ‘you soldier types’ before, and the less they knew about how long they’d been in the medbay the better. Of course, Jedi don’t need chronos to know the time, but she hasn’t had the heart to tell him that yet. He seemed so pleased with himself for thinking of it.

 

Rea waves the sergeant’s concern away with a careless gesture. “I wouldn’t worry,” she says. “Probably just got held up flirting with a shapely bench or something. You know how he is.”

 

“He said--”

 

“Doc’s fine,” she insists, hoping it’s true. It’s too early in the day to have another crisis on her hands, not when she hasn’t finished dealing with the other two yet. “I’m not worried about Doc. I _am_ worried about you. How are you feeling?”

 

“Operating at 21% efficiency, Master Jedi,” Rusk reports, a little hoarse. She wonders if his throat’s bothering him now or if it’s just that hard to own that number. Wherever that number came from. “I’d be a liability on the field right now, ma’am, but I’ll be back to peak condition soon.”

 

“Thanks for the assessment, Sergeant, but I was asking how you _felt_ , not how effective you’d be in a firefight.” She doesn’t mention that 21% seems a little inflated anyway, given that he can’t stand upright for more than forty seconds at a time.

 

“I feel…” Rusk’s voice trails off as his red-rimmed eyes squeeze shut and he heaves a rattling sigh. Feeling looks like it hurts. “I think I feel sick,” he says finally.

 

It’s probably the best she’s going to get out of him.

 

Rea pulls fresh blankets from the warmer and tucks them around Rusk, fluffing the pillows under his head and adjusting his lethorns, brushing her knuckles across his sweat-damp forehead. It’s much too hot, and the little monitor beside the bed is showing a heart beating too fast and too shallow to be good. Maybe the blankets are bad? Maybe she should give him some kolto?

 

Maybe she should find an actual doctor and make _him_ fix her soldier.

 

Rusk’s eyes pop open when she gives his shoulder a squeeze, bloodshot and bewildered. “Master Jedi? How long--”

 

Rea gives him her most reassuring smile, tugging the blankets just a little bit higher. “Go back to sleep, Sergeant. That’s an order.”

 

“Yes, ma’am.”

 

# # #

 

Rea hasn’t moved an inch from where he left her, draped across the bed in a tangle of blankets and pillows, still fast asleep. He contemplates the merits of leaving her to rest, just a while longer, but she takes the decision out of his hands, popping her eyes open like she can sense him standing there. Maybe she can.

 

“What’s up, Doc?” She croaks out, and he’s probably a bad man for finding the crackling, husky quality of her voice so damn appealing. “Galaxy still in one piece?”

 

“Galaxy’s fine,” he lies, settling onto the edge of the bed. “Don’t you worry, gorgeous. It’ll survive a few days without you.”

 

“Worried?” Rea snorts. With the blockage in her sinuses, it’s not a pleasant sound. “Who’s worried? I’m having the time of my life. Just laying in bed, being pampered and pitied.” She makes a noise he thinks is supposed to be a sigh that leaves snot leaking from her nose. It’s as adorable as it is gross. “I wanna be sick forever.”

 

Doc smiles at her, brushing the hair from her sweat-damp forehead. He’s not sure he would call this pampering exactly, but if she’s happy, he’s not gonna argue the point. “If it’s a vacation you want, Beautiful, that can be arranged. Once you’re healthy.”

 

“‘S not a vacation if you can’t go down on me, I guess.” Her half-lidded eyes flutter sleepily, the blue of them that much bluer for being rimmed in red. He thinks how nice it would be to stay here with her, to climb into her hothouse of blankets and sweat this out together, blind and deaf to the problems beyond her door.

 

There are _so_ many problems.

 

As much as Doc likes to think he has a certain kind of insight into how much Nirea Velaran does for the galaxy, the last two days have been eye-opening. Even with all of them working together, the crew's only handling a fraction of the shit she apparently handles every single day. And damn if she doesn't make it look easier than it is. They've only walked in her shoes for two days and they're already flirting with just letting the galaxy burn.

 

Doc never thought he’d find anyone who could even keep up with him, but here he is with a woman who can outpace him on her worst day. A woman he never seems to get tired of, who might just like him as much as he likes her. If dealing with some bureaucratic banthashit is what it takes to hold on to her, Doc finds he’s more than willing to do it. Even if it’s tedious and boring and awful. Even if he’d much rather spend the day tangled up in her bed, basking in the dopey way she’s smiling at him.

 

He brushes the hair back from her forehead and tries not to overthink his own dopey grin. “You get better,” he promises, “and I’ll go down on you ‘til my jaw falls off, Gorgeous.”

 

#  # #

 

Lord Scourge collapses without warning.

 

Rhese is just barely quick enough to catch him, fingers grasping the edges of Scourge’s cape only a heartbeat before the Sith plummets to his death a kilometer below. The last-second save nearly yanks Rhese’s arm from its socket, but he figures a little pain is a fair price if it will spare him months upon months of Rea laughing at him for getting an immortal man killed.

 

Saving Scourge’s life, he supposes, is also a good thing.

 

He hauls the Sith’s big red ass back over the ledge slowly and with no small amount of effort. Rhese isn’t weak by any stretch of the imagination, but Scourge is as dense as he is large and the heavy armor isn’t exactly helping matters. It’s not a detail he plans to mention when he tells this story later, but he’s perfectly happy to grouse about it now.

 

Rhese has just collapsed beneath Scourge’s weight, sweaty and panting with three hundred pounds of Sith draped across his lap, when Scourge jerks violently back to consciousness. He jams his (heavily armored) elbow directly into Rhese’s (entirely unarmored) groin in his haste to be upright. Rhese whines an embarrassing, high-pitched whine that he also plans to leave out of this story later.

 

Scourge takes in his surroundings slowly and suspiciously, apparently unaware of his own elbow. “I believe,” he says, in that measured, deliberate way he has, “I may be unwell.”

 

“No shit?” Rhese wheezes without entirely meaning to. It’s unbecoming of a Jedi, but he’s tired and in pain and it’s not like he actually gives a fuck about the good opinion of some crazy Sith stalker who has ‘visions’ of his sister. Scourge shifts again, examining his body now, and Rhese grunts in yet more pain. Sometimes he wonders if the Force has some kind of kink for making him suffer.

 

“Scourge,” Rhese tries and fails to sound as though he has some degree of command over his own voice right now. “Get off my dick.”

 

After a moment of painful fumbling--the Sith doesn’t seem to be entirely in control of his limbs--Scourge manages to push himself into a sort of collapsed kneeling position on the ground. “My body is not responding as it should,” he says. Like that’s a normal response to getting sick.

 

Rhese, deciding he has suffered enough for the day, indulges himself in the urge to cradle his tender parts. “You couldn’t have mentioned you were sick _before_ we started this twenty kilometer hike?”

 

“I did not know.”

 

“You didn’t--” Rhese barks a pained, mirthless laugh. “How do you not _know_?”

 

“My senses are diminished,” Scourge answers sharply, sounding almost _bitter._  “It does not usually affect my performance.”

 

He hears a joke about _performance_ in the back of his mind, in a voice that sounds suspiciously like Rea’s. Not for the first time, Rhese wonders whether he really is imagining these moments, or if his sister might have some rare ability to project childish jokes into the minds of unsuspecting victims. It would be like her to keep that sort of thing secret just to fuck with him.

 

Scourge frowns down at his own hands like they’ve personally betrayed him, blissfully free of any inappropriate mental Nireas. “I have not been sick in nearly a century,” he complains.

 

Rhese finds it difficult to work up anything like sympathy for the giant jewel-crusher. “That’s what you get for hanging around Rea,” he says, thinking again of Scourge’s _performance_. “Force knows she’s given me plenty to be sick about.”

 

# # #

 

Kira blinks up at him with glassy, bloodshot eyes.

 

He forgets, sometimes, how young she is. With her sharp tongue and caustic attitude and apparent comfort with extreme violence, it can be hard to remember. Curled into herself on a medbay cot, though, pale and trembling and so very small, Doc can’t seem to see anything but the youth in her face. 

 

“Bastard,” she swears at him.

 

Doc just smiles. “It’s the oldest trick in the book, Red. I can’t believe you fell for it.”

 

“I hate you.”

 

So, _so_ young. “You love me. Just try not to go spreading it around. Rea’s the jealous type.”

 

Kira snorts and Doc congratulates himself for excellent bedside manner as he pretends not to notice the snot bubble that forms in her nose. “How did you even get me in here? I know _you_ didn’t carry me.” She looks him up and down in a way that implies very clearly she doesn’t think he can.

 

“I could carry you just fine if I wanted. Ol’ Doc works out.” If you count supporting Rea while he pounds her into the wall as working out. Doc certainly does. All those firm, shapely muscles aren’t exactly light.

 

“Maybe you _could_ ,” Kira says, doubtfully, “but we both know you wouldn’t. You might wrinkle your shirt.”

 

Hard to argue with that. These Jedi types might not respect fine fabrics and good tailoring, but he sure did. “Alright, you got me, Red. Your boyfriend hauled you down here after you ate it. Figured it was the least he could do, seeing as he’s the one who got you sick in the first place.”

 

“Rhese is _not_ my boyfriend--”

 

“Does he know that?” Doc grins the shit-eating grin she hates the most and waggles his eyebrows at her. Riling her up is fun on an ordinary day—almost as much fun as riling up her boyfriend—but messing with her while she’s doped up and delirious with fever is a special kind of treat.

 

Kira flushes a bright pink, which he’s glad for both as her doctor and as someone who loves to fuck with her. “Shut up,” she snaps. “It’s not like that. We don’t even like each other; we just complain about the same things sometimes.”

 

“Oh yeah? Is that how you contracted a virus that’s only transmitted through the exchange of bodily fluids?” Not strictly true, but Doc would be good credits that’s how it happened. And by the way her flush darkens, spreading down her neck and out to the tips of her ears, he’s right.

 

“Shut up,” she grumbles again.

 

“You’re mean when you’re sick,” he laughs.

 

“I’m always mean.”

 

“Only to me, Red. But don’t worry. I know you only pull my pigtails cause you love me.”

 

Kira snorts another disgusting snort and collapses backward onto her cot. Her arms are crossed over her chest like a petulant child. “Can you please sedate me again so I don’t have to talk to you anymore?”

 

# # #

 

“Do I want to know how this happened?”

 

Rhese has his back to her as he works, but hiding his face isn’t enough to hide his embarrassment. Even if she couldn’t sense it--and she definitely _can_ \--the back of his neck and his ears are both flaming red and Rea does have eyes. She glances down at the droid beside her and rolls her eyes, forgetting for a moment that he’s preoccupied with his own situation.

 

Once she’s looked at him, and, more specifically, at the holovid he’s playing on loop, Rea finds herself preoccupied with Teeseven’s situation too. She’s never been that into porn--she’s more of a _doer_  than a dreamer--but the architect of this virus chose their vid well. It’s as artistic as it is acrobatic. It makes her wonder if Rhese can separate the vid from the infected code; she’s pretty sure Doc would appreciate it as much as she does.

 

“Uh,” Rea says, distracted. _Would cargo bands have enough elasticity to substitute for both restraints and supports? How would Doc hold up in zero-G?_

 

“Rea!” Rhese snaps her back to the present, his voice sounding strained. “Can you _please_ not fantasize while I’m standing right here?”

 

Oh, right. Her brother can sense things too. Rea swallows back her laughter; she doesn’t want to piss him off right now. Not until he’s fixed Teeseven, at least. “Would you believe I finally found someone in SIS who’s not a total dumbass?”

 

“No,” Rhese says, immediately and with certainty. He’s cleaned up after as many SIS fuck ups as she has.

 

“Well, I did. And they have a sense of humor too.” She frowns as another thought occurs to her. “Either that or I found an Imperial mole.”

 

Rhese snorts, and with a few more taps of his fingers, Teeseven’s very intriguing holovid finally flickers out. “What were you doing snooping around in SIS files, anyway?”

 

“Would you believe me if I said I was bored?”

 

“No. But I already know any explanation you’re willing to give me will be a lie.” The way he says it is more resigned than bitter, which Rea figures is progress. Doesn’t stop the twinge of guilt in her belly, but she’s used to that. If a little guilt is the price of keeping Rhese out of this nonsense, she’ll pay it happily.

 

Before she can think of a joke dumb enough to distract him from his feelings, Teeseven screams. He doesn't stop screaming as his head starts to spin in circles so fast she gets dizzy just watching, like something from a cheap horror holo. His photoreceptor flickers on, glowing a deep, ominous red, and his body seems to be vibrating with some kind of pent up energy.

 

Rea finally thinks of a pretty good joke--it's about climaxes--but the moment’s passed. “That doesn’t look good,” she says.

 

“No shit.” Rhese swears under his breath as he dives for the wires connecting the astromech to the terminal, yanking them free with extreme prejudice. It doesn’t seem to affect Teeseven, but it does freeze the Twi’lek that’s just appeared on his screen, naked and begging to meet singles in their area with her legs--and other parts--splayed wide open. 

 

“Maybe it was Cole Steele’s files I was trying to hack,” Rea muses, impressed by what she assumes is a failsafe.

 

“He’s a fictional character, Rea!” Rhese shouts back, a little frantic as he tears open the control panel in the rear of Teeseven’s chassis. “How many times do we-- _Son of a hutt!_ ” Rhese jerks his hand back, a crackle of electricity leaping after it. “He shocked me!”

 

“I’m sure he didn’t mean to. He’s not feeling very well right now.”

 

Her brother takes a precious moment to glower at her before turning back to peer inside their possessed astromech friend. She can feel him probing with the Force, subtly manipulating patterns of energy she can barely even sense. Feeling a bit useless, Rea pats Teeseven’s still-spinning head in what she hopes is a reassuring gesture and tries to think encouraging thoughts at Rhese.

 

It seems to work.

 

He emerges from the depths of Teeseven’s chassis a moment later with a triumphant “Ha!” and a singed yellow wire in his hand. “Clever little bastard! He had to fry me so he could fry this! Now I have access to--” Rhese’s sentence gets swallowed up by Teeseven’s screaming as he dives back into the chassis with renewed excitement.

 

Rea has no idea what that wire is or why it needed to be fried, but she’s happy to believe Teeseven was very clever to do it. “Good job, buddy,” she coos at him, still patting his spinning head. “Looking out for us even when you’re a possessed pornbot. Takes more than some stupid SIS virus to get to you, doesn’t it?”

 

All at once, the screaming and the spinning stop. The ominous red light in Teeseven’s photoreceptor fades to blue then green then flashes a dozen different colors in quick succession as he starts beeping and whirring too fast for Rea to make out what he’s trying to say. Then, abruptly, he powers down completely.

 

Rhese emerges from his chassis with a victorious smile, still gripping that yellow wire in his fist. “There. Nothing a little self-repair cycle can’t fix now.”

 

Rea tackles him to the floor in a hug so forceful Rhese has to wheeze to breathe. “I knew you could do it,” she laughs.

 

Pressed cheek to cheek like they are, she can feel the way his face heats at the praise. He can probably feel the tears starting to gather at the corners of her eyes.

 

After a moment of heavy silence, Rhese sighs, a little too dramatically to be entirely sincere. “Sometimes think you love that droid more than you love me.”


End file.
